How the Classics Made Shakespeare is about the influence of ancient Greek and Roman literature and philosophy on Shakespeare's writings. The book addresses a “broad general audience,” although the author, Jonathan Bate, also hopes that “cognoscenti … will find things [in it] that they did not know or had not noticed” (x). There is indeed much for these cognoscenti as well. Fourteen chapters offer surveys of various aspects of Shakespeare's career alongside its Greek and Roman models—Vergil as a model for how to think about national history; Aristotle for how to think about literary genre; Cicero for how to simply think. Bate's learning is prodigious, ranging from Ovidian erotic poetry to traditions of deliberative rhetoric, Juvenalian satire, Tacitus, early modern mediators of these traditions, and, of course, Shakespeare's plays. Aside from the things one might not have known or noticed, there are things one may have known once but then forgot, or always knew but never considered deeply.

Partly then, the book is a series of interrelated case studies about literary influence. Chapter 2 contends that Shakespeare repurposed the Roman goddess Venus to construct a worldview contradicting Christian dogmatism. Chapter 3 shows that his habit of developing his characters by reference to historical examples draws on the ancient rhetorical technique called paradigma. Ovid and Seneca informed Shakespeare's understanding of individual psychology (chapters 11 and 12); Neo-Platonic ideas about magic were his mass psychology (chapter 10). Some lines of influence are looser than are others, but the choice to conceive of influence broadly and ecumenically is conscious, and it leads to many engaging discussions.

The book's agenda reaches further, however. Punctuating the discussion of influence is a series of meditations on the future of the humanities. Chapter 1, which doubles as an introduction, observes that Shakespeare today occupies approximately the place in school curricula that the Greek and Roman classics did in Elizabethan England. It suggests that Shakespeare might soon go the way of his ancient sources, whose public and public-intellectual currency has dropped precipitously, and ponders the playwright's future in a world where attention spans are shortened by the internet and where historical consciousness is flattened by a variety of factors. (There is also a dig at classics departments, whose shrinking number of students apparently no longer read the Latin of Shakespeare's sources especially well [12].) Some readers will find it difficult to endorse this dystopian vision or will question the occasionally alarmist tone in which it is conveyed. Yet anyone professionally invested in studying Shakespeare (or anything else early modern or English) will be able to appreciate some version of the anxiety induced by the underlying question: what justifies our position in a curriculum where space is limited?

Relevant here is the book's origin in a lecture series at the Warburg Institute. Especially early on, Bate dwells on Aby Warburg's life story—the Hamburg banker's son who used his fortune to buy books, fled to London during the Nazi years, and founded a scholarly institute on the principle that humanistic education can transcend cultural boundaries and differences. Warburg's vision appeals to Bate, who discusses especially its subsequent development by Ernst Robert Curtius, best known for his 1948 European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Fearing that the atrocities of the mid-twentieth century would precipitate a new dark age in Europe, Curtius took inspiration from medieval efforts to preserve Latin literature as part of a shared European heritage (see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask [2013]). How the Classics Made Shakespeare draws a parallel to the current predicament of classic literature, early modern as well as Roman. It duly acknowledges the obvious limitations both of the parallel and of Curtius's vision of humanistic learning, which was written at a time in which book burnings posed a greater threat than did information overload and which attends less to the importance of gender and racial diversity than a similar argument would probably need to today. Even in acknowledging such limitations, however, the first two chapters of How the Classics Made Shakespeare orient themselves by reference to Curtius's vision of a transhistorical literary community. Readers looking for substantial engagement with that culturally conservative case for the humanities will be disappointed, however. The ideas of the Warburg circle quickly fade from view, and Curtius ultimately serves more as an inspiration than as an interlocutor.

Nonetheless, How the Classics Made Shakespeare does eventually suggest its own answer to the question, “Why still Shakespeare?” The last pages contend that the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century valorization of English literature as an academic subject with Shakespeare at its center emerged from liberalizing and democratizing movements that broadened access to humanities education, nurtured the left-wing political radicalism of many readers, and ultimately wrested British academe away from a snobbish, politically conservative elite that preferred to be taught only Latin literature until surprisingly late. The book's answer to its guiding question thus seems to be that Shakespeare is worth teaching, because teaching him has historically been associated with liberalism and democracy. The argument is appealing, although an unsympathetic reader may counter that it elides the difference between historically and inherently democratizing tendencies, and that it conveniently ignores the many anti-democratic, illiberal, and right-wing thinkers who also found inspiration in Shakespeare, including, unfortunately, some of the architects of the regime Warburg fled.

Beyond its engaging and illuminating discussion of literary influence, How the Classics Made Shakespeare thus proposes two suggestive but ultimately incomplete solutions to the anxieties motivating the book. Yet this incomplete theoretical project must be weighed against the book's successful praxis, which makes Shakespeare's plays more accessible to contemporary and future readers by illuminating an intellectual context that, like everything else in history, grows more distant with every passing year. If Shakespeare literacy fosters even a fraction of the social and political goods the book's final chapter suggests it might, then this is a great service.